Before it was even completed, the legacy of the Populous-designed stadium for the London 2012 Olympics was a thorny issue. Originally designed to be largely dismantled after the games, a sudden interest in the future stadium from local football teams led to an about-face by the government, resulting in a renewed brief for a design that could be adapted to host football matches. What followed after the games was recently described by The Guardian's sports correspondent Owen Gibson as "a huge, expensive engineering puzzle" in which "to all intents and purposes, it has been completely rebuilt."
Tonight the stadium will host its first major sporting event since the end of the Olympics, a Rugby World Cup match between France and Romania. To mark the building's reopening, Populous has released this video demonstrating how the stadium has been remodeled and reconfigured: adding new amenities, adjustable seating, a significantly extended roof and repositioning the iconic triangular floodlights that were the stadium's 2012 signature, in order to ensure the long-term future of the stadium and the local area.
